“An amazing piece of work on many levels. The prose is shimmering, the observations
unique, the cultural context is brilliantly done…It’s like Naipaul without the unbridled anger and with love. Badhwar has taken the expatriate experience, reinvented it and turned a Third World Novel into a Whole World Novel. It’s very brave…it’s wise.”

In Badhwar’s novel two worlds embrace each other, lovingly and without judgment, two vanished worlds to which the protagonist remains the only living witness - the lost world of feudal India whose Englishspeaking middle class is captivated by American pop culture and the now-evanesced world of the Counter Culture generation of America inspired by Hindu
gurus, crypto-Leftists and instant pundits. In the American world the quest is to defeat death, while the Indian world seeks only to define death.